


one last evening out, 1942

by puckity



Series: friends, or something like it [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Bathroom Sex, Bisexuality, Coitus Interruptus, Historical Queer Culture, Jealousy, M/M, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Slightly Resolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-15
Updated: 2014-07-15
Packaged: 2018-02-09 01:16:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1963488
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/puckity/pseuds/puckity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky picks the bar, Steve buys the drinks, and neither one of them brings up the fact that tomorrow Bucky is going into the army.</p>
            </blockquote>





	one last evening out, 1942

**Author's Note:**

> My take on various pre-war fanons I've seen floating around.
> 
> Written as a continuation of my 2014 Star-Spangled Fic Exchange entry and beta'd by the wonderful-as-ever Rachel!
> 
> You can also follow me on [Tumblr](http://puckity.tumblr.com/).

“Here’s to givin’ those Nazi bastards something to write home about!” Bucky’s grin is stretched like the last cut of cellophane on a roll and underneath it’s all teeth. His fourth glass sloshes against Steve’s first bottle and whiskey drips sticky down Steve’s thin fingers. Bucky gulps and pounds while Steve nurses, a couple of dimes jingling in the pocket of his slacks. He’d said drinks were on him, since Bucky picked the place and paid the cab fare, but if Bucky keeps drinking like this Steve is gonna have to be good with one beer for the night.

“You ready for another?” Bucky’s gaze flicks to the space between the bottle lip and Steve’s slightly open mouth. Steve’s trying to ration his alcohol but Bucky narrows his eyes like he’s reading a deck of cards and Steve self-consciously takes a swig to counter the challenge. He sputters a little and Bucky laughs, open palm smacking against Steve’s back harder than the cough warrants and then trailing down warm. Steve straightens at the touch and Bucky drops it off before it hits the base of his spine.

“I’m still working on mine.” The bottle slips out from between Steve’s lips with a pop that he doesn’t expect.

Bucky shifts on his barstool and looks down at the wet-ringed counter. He rattles the ice cubes in his empty glass and the bartender starts to make his way over until Bucky waves him off. The bartender pauses and his eyes linger on Bucky in a way Steve recognizes. A way that makes Steve squirm on his stool, makes him grip his bottle tight—thankful that the glass is too thick to shatter—and bring it down too hard on the heavy oak. Bucky jumps a little at the crack of glass against wood and frowns over at him, says _Jesus Steve_ with his eyebrows furrowed and blows a hot puff of air out of his nose.

Steve gives him a tight smile and he knows that he isn’t fooling Bucky, hasn’t been fooling Bucky since they walked into this place. Hasn’t been fooling him since this morning, since yesterday, since last week when Steve leafed through the mail and saw a yellow envelope from the draft board with Bucky’s name on it marked “Urgent”. Steve didn’t need to see Bucky’s face when he opened it to know that these were his induction orders; he didn’t want to see Bucky’s face when he opened it. He took a long walk down to the cemetery and stared at his parents’ headstones for a while and when he came home both the letter and Bucky were gone.

They didn’t talk about it, not in so many words. Bucky came home the next morning with a rumpled shirt and dark circles under his eyes and what Steve guessed were lipstick smears down the side of his neck and Steve didn’t say anything and Bucky didn’t offer. He cleaned up and went to work and that evening they went out for pizza and ice cream like they always did on Thursdays. The next day Bucky started packing and Steve saw the letter on their dresser but they still didn’t talk about it. Bucky tried to set up a double date but Steve bowed out at the last minute, lied about a having a nasty headache. Bucky looked at him cold but didn’t question him. So Bucky went out on the date for the both of them while Steve waited in line at an enlistment center in Queens and neither of them got lucky that night.

Finally after five days of ignoring it, Bucky had said with his back to Steve, “What d’ya say, just you and me go out tonight? I’ve gotta report tomorrow morning and who knows when I’ll get the chance to see you drunk again.”

Steve said, “Why not?” And now they are here.

They haven’t been to this bar before. It’s not the kind of place they usually go to, although when it’s just the two of them they don’t go out to bars much anyway. They go to soda shops and hole-in-the-wall diners and free museums that Steve drags Bucky to as payback for years of smoky dance halls and awkward dinners for four. Sometimes they buy a few beers and sit squeezed in together on the back steps of their apartment building at dusk watching fireflies and not sharing more than ten words between them. Mostly they stay home, where Steve doesn’t have to watch other people trying to get Bucky’s attention and Bucky giving it to them. Where Steve doesn’t feel like he’s on the wrong end of a competition. 

The bartender has moved on to the far end of the counter; he’s chatting idly with a tall woman in an angular suit and close-cropped hair. She pulls a cigar out of her breast pocket and Steve stares as her gaze traces the curves of a girl in a polka-dotted dress walking by. In a dim corner two men are leaning close across a table. One reaches towards the other and rests two fingers over his hand. Steve is curious—this is the same kind of overwarm, washed out place that he’s ended up at when the double dates go well except that here no one is dancing and all the double dates seem to have split apart down the center. Suddenly two girls with pinned curls are standing up and wrapping around each other, not dancing so much as swaying in time to a mournful croon coming out of the radio. The men in the corner are moving closer, so close, too close and their eyelids are fluttering shut and Steve knows he can’t watch. He feels like he’d be intruding if he did—like reading a diary or a classified file—so he looks away. Catches Bucky catching him, biting at his lip like he’s got something he wants to say.

Steve stammers, chokes a little on the shallow breaths crowding his lungs. His chest feels like it’s half full of sand or tar and he tells himself that that is why his throat’s so tight. He swallows down the rest of his beer and motions for another before he thinks to stop himself.

“Hey there, soldier.” The voice glides above Steve’s shoulder and he flinches at the sudden sound. He turns and a man comes into view, broad but not tall with slick hair and a grin to match. “How’s it going?”

Steve feels the familiar churn start in his stomach; Bucky’s wearing his new uniform even though Steve had told him not to.

“It’ll get dirty,” he’d said as he noticed how sharp a figure Bucky cut in it.

The man stands near Bucky and Steve looks between them, thinking that there is something similar stretching from one man to the other. He watches Bucky clench his jaw, eyes dark in a way that makes it hard for Steve to gauge him. He doesn’t say anything.

The man shifts his weight from one foot to the other. “What’s the matter—” he glances at Bucky. “Your fella’s shy or what?”

For a moment Steve doesn’t understand. Then he realizes that the man is looking at _him_ , has been looking at _him_ the whole time with the too-big army jacket Bucky gave him because he was cold still hanging off his body. The muscles in Bucky’s jaw twitch.

“Nah, I’m not—” Steve pauses, feels a surge and pulls himself up tall in his chair. “I’m not shy. We’re just having a quiet night, that’s all.”

“Yeah?” The man quirks his head and smiles like Steve just said something awful funny. “Mind if I buy you a drink then?”

“Not tonight.” Steve’s tone is light and his mind buzzes. He feels heady like the first time he held a girl so close that he could feel the swell of her breasts beneath her sweater and smell the perfume she’d dabbed on her neck. He adds with a small grin of his own, “Maybe next time.”

The man hesitates for a second like he might want to try another angle, then just winks and walks away. Steve lets out a breath he didn’t know he was holding and picks up his new beer.

“This is a hell of a place, Buck.” Steve throws it out and feels better for it. He chuckles and shakes his head to himself and Bucky mumbles something into his glass that Steve can’t quite hear.

Steve is only a few sips in when Bucky stands and leaves without saying anything, walks straight to the toilet. He shrugs to himself; Bucky always gets a little huffy when someone tries to get fresh with Steve—he once ended a date early because he thought Steve’s girl was being too familiar—so Steve lets him go to clear his head. When he finishes the bottle and there’s still no Bucky he gets a little irritated himself. He settles their bill and hops off the barstool, steadying himself on shaky legs. He weaves through the edge of the dance floor—the place is so cramped that there isn’t much difference between the edge and the center—where more couples have started to gather. He sees the man from before with his arms around a skinny, frail looking kid with a mop of dark hair and slacks that are too long for him. They drift behind someone’s back and out of view and Steve turns down a narrow hallway towards the bathrooms. He pushes his way into the men’s room and the only thing he sees is Bucky at the sink washing blood off his knuckles and down the drain.

“Buck! What happened?!” Steve’s fast but Bucky’s faster and Steve reaches for his hand just as Bucky pulls it back. “Did you get into a fight back here? No wonder it was taking you so long.”

“Yeah, got into a fight.” Bucky slurs like he’s drunk when Steve knows he isn’t. He holds his hand out of Steve’s reach, like a stubborn child. “At least I got in one good punch.” He nods at the tiles above the urinal, splattered with a few smears of dark red.

Steve blanches, lunges forward and grabs Bucky’s hand away from him like he might just snap it off.

“You punched the _wall_?” He stretches each of Bucky’s fingers slowly, presses gentle between each knuckle, gauging the flinches and hisses that come with the pressure. It seems like mostly cuts and bruising but he’s no doctor so he can’t be sure.

“It was either the wall or that guy’s fucking head.” Bucky looks at Steve, tries to make it smooth but can’t seem to keep a cold anger from cutting out around the words. His voice starts to turn sour and mean. “Thought you might not appreciate me breaking his pretty face before you got that drink.”

Steve drops Bucky’s hand, lets it fall and feels vindicated when Bucky winces at the drop. He crosses his arms. “That’s what this is about? Christ, Buck, you can’t even let me have one compliment—you gotta go and get jealous that for once someone wanted to buy me a drink instead of you.”

At that, Bucky has the decency to look ashamed. “It ain’t—I ain’t—it’s not like that, Steve. You deserve all the compliments you get. You deserve a hell of a lot more than you get.” Bucky’s eyes drop with his voice, low and small and Steve loosens his arms across his chest.

“So what then? You’re upset that it was a fella paying the compliment? You’re the one who brought us here, don’t tell me you didn’t know what kind of a place this was.” Steve drops his eyes too, focuses on the mingled shoeprints on the floor one pressed over another. “It’s not just dames that compliment _you_ , Buck.”

Bucky’s eyes flash and he’s reaching out and pushing Steve before he seems to even realize that he’s doing it. “What’re you saying, Steve?”

Steve stumbles, stunned and full of beer and tar and sand sloshing around inside of him. Something is rising—that squirming, that clenching, that tight throat and hard squeeze crash of glass and wood—and Steve’s surging forward and pushing Bucky as hard as he can and falling with him against the grimy ceramic wall.

“What’re _you_ saying, Buck?” Steve’s chest heaves; he’s got his fists bunched up in Bucky’s regulation uniform shirt and whatever else happens tonight Bucky’s not gonna look clean-pressed for his induction test tomorrow. “You wanna say something—then just come out and say it.”

Bucky’s so close, too close, close like the back stairs at dusk, close like the mattresses they share in the frosty dark, close like stealing glances at each other alone in the apartment with no one but themselves there to know. Close like they’ve always been, for as long as Steve wants to remember, close like best friends. Closer than best friends, closer than brothers even—though neither of them would know much about that. Close in a way that keeps Steve up at night, and in a way that eventually lulls him to sleep.

“Steve.” Bucky’s voice rattles. His eyes are wide and a little wild, like a cornered animal, and his month hangs slack. Just barely open

Steve reaches down and pulls Bucky’s bloodied hand into his. “Just say it, Bucky.”

For a moment Steve thinks he’ll do it, thinks he sees Bucky screwing up his nerve and he waits for it, but it doesn’t come.

Bucky shakes his head, all the tricks washed off his face and Steve thinks that Bucky is more naked now than he’s ever been shuffling around their apartment with his clothes off.

When something finally comes out of his mouth, it’s just a whisper. “I can’t.”

Steve’s vision goes fuzzy. His fingers are tingling and it’s almost painful, this live wire between them. It feels like he could light a match and they’d both go up in flames. He blinks away the haze and stretches up on tiptoes. “It’s okay—I can.” And Steve kisses Bucky.

If the air was sparks before, it goes dead cold now. Bucky is stone, like granite or marble with no warmth and no give and Steve is melting like asphalt on an August afternoon. Not melting in a good way—like girls talk about when Clark Gable pulls his leading lady in and kisses her speechless—but melting like the icing on a cake when the colors run together and it’s not special anymore. It’s just watery streaks of colored sugar that were meant to be something else.

Kissing Bucky was meant to be something else; something that nagged at Steve in the selfish impulses of his mind that he always tries to refocus—to redirect into useful, practical goals that he can be proud of. Kissing Bucky wasn’t particularly noble but Steve knows, he _knows_ , that it could be good. Steve had kissed and been kissed before—not a lot but probably more than most folks would think just by looking at him—so he knows a good kiss from a bad kiss.

And this? This kiss with Bucky.

It’s bad.

Midway through Steve stops, pulls back, isn’t going to keep going if Bucky’s gonna act like a brick wall about it. He drops his feet flat and feels a tug at the sides of his—Bucky’s—jacket. Bucky’s hands are fisted tight in the fabric and Steve starts to get it; Bucky hadn’t pushed him away, hadn’t stopped Steve with a friendly palm to the chest and an embarrassed, apologetic sigh. Steve glances up and Bucky won’t meet his eyes so he lifts the hand that’s already swelling black and green and kisses it wet along the ridges of bone and jagged cuts across flesh.

Bucky jolts and his breath hitches. Steve’s feeling bold again; he traces his tongue in the dips between Bucky’s fingers. That earns him a half-swallowed groan and Bucky’s free hand gripping him firm by the shoulder like he wants to talk some sense into him.

“Steve.” Bucky’s voice cracks and Steve stops but doesn’t let go of his hand. Bucky’s staring at him, finally ready to look him in the eye. “This ain’t—”

Steve tilts his head slightly, squints up at Bucky. Waits for him to continue, to finish, to say what he’s been needing to say for years. He stumbles over it and corrects himself; he starts again.

“This isn’t how I wanted it to go.”

And Steve is so relieved, for a second his body just wilts. There were a dozen ways Bucky could have ended that sentence and Steve is so glad that he chose this one.

He smiles, soft and serious. “What does it matter how it goes, Buck?” And Steve admits that it could have gone better, but it could have gone a hell of a lot worse too. “There’s nobody judging it except us. We can make it whatever we want it to be.”

“Yeah.” Steve’s not sure if Bucky’s asking or agreeing but then Bucky’s leaning down or pulling him up and the live wire crackles on contact.

Bucky’s kissing him hot and sloppy like Steve has never seen him do with dames. His hands are up and down Steve’s back and on his hips and his whiskey-laced tongue is pushing past the rows of Steve’s teeth. Steve is crowding him rough against the tiles and even though Bucky could easily overpower him he’s letting Steve manhandle him a bit and Steve is running with it, trying his damnedest not to rip buttons off as he works Bucky’s uniform shirt open. He’s not sure what his next move will be but he can’t stand the starchy folds underneath his fingertips. He wants to feel the jut of collarbone and the lines of sweat that must be rolling down into a tangle of coarse chest hair. Bucky’s wound tight—Steve can feel it in the flex of his lean muscles—and Steve’s own body feels like a piano wire that’s over-tuned and ready to snap. He rolls his hips and Bucky’s moans loud into his mouth. Steve knows why, is grateful that army slacks can’t hide the hard press of Bucky’s cock against his own, twitching in his good dress pants. He fumbles to work out the shirttails with one hand as he gropes blind and more than two-beers-drunk at Bucky’s belt and zipper.

Bucky swats his hand away and Steve breaks the kiss to glare at him. Bucky blinks slow and uneven with his shirt collar three buttons open and the dip of his undershirt peeking out. Steve watches him drag his bloodied hand across sticky red lips and up to slick a few stray hairs back out of his eyes. Then he reaches for the belt buckle himself, undoes it, and grins lopsided and toothy and Steve knows that’s the grin his mother should have warned him about more. He hears Bucky unzip and reflexively licks his lips.

Steve’s hands hover over the front of his own slacks and Bucky seems to catch his hesitation because he stands up straighter and pushes the jacket off Steve’s shoulders and onto the dirty bathroom floor. Steve unzips just in time for Bucky to wrap him up fierce with palms down his back and trailing over his ass and Steve presses his nose into the hollow of Bucky’s throat and inhales. He tries to absorb the smell of sharp liquor and cigarettes and cured meats soaked into Bucky’s skin, tries to mark the imprint of Bucky’s body against his—the living mold of it—and tries to listen to the pump of Bucky’s lungs and Bucky’s heart that are too loud even for being right under his skin. Steve wants to tell him to relax, that he’s gonna have a heart attack, but then he thinks that maybe it’s his own beating that he hears pounding in his ears.

Steve reaches up underneath Bucky’s undershirt—traces a line of ribs—then slides down towards his open pants. Bucky squeezes him harder, ghosts a kiss along Steve’s jaw, and Steve fingers slip along the trail of hair as it disappears beneath Bucky’s underwear. The beat is almost deafening now; Steve can’t even hear the bathroom door opening over it.

“Oh, sorry fellas. Didn’t know this room was occupied.”

Bucky goes rigid and the beat drains from Steve’s ears until there’s nothing but a blanketing silence. He doesn’t turn—doesn’t need to turn to know that it’s his admirer from before with the shrimpy, scruffy kid in tow—and two sets of footsteps shuffle awkwardly out, letting the door slam shut with a nasty kind of vengeance. They don’t take the silence with them and Steve wishes they would because he’s still in Bucky’s arms and Bucky’s still in his and their cocks are still smothered between them and Steve wants to keep going but they’ve blown a fuse now and they need to reset it.

Bucky’s grip goes soft and he drops his head into the crook of Steve’s neck. His body shudders a little and Steve’s stomach bottoms out. It sounds like Bucky’s crying. But then Steve feels lips run along the curve of his throat and realizes that it’s muffled laughter he’s hearing.

Steve punches Bucky half-heartedly in the arm. “What’s so funny?”

Bucky’s breath tickles under Steve’s open collar and Bucky hunches his shoulders and flinches away from another hit.

He murmurs against Steve’s skin. “Never did that before.”

“What?” Steve scrunches his face even though Bucky can’t see it. “Never kissed a fella before, or never fooled around in a bathroom before?” Bucky pauses and Steve’s more curious than he’d like to admit.

“Never got caught.” He hums it out and Steve’s suddenly got half a dozen questions but Bucky pulls back and holds him out at arm’s length and hits him square with the stern look that he keeps for when Steve gets himself into fights or doesn’t dress warmly enough. “When this war’s over, I’ll make it up to you.”

Steve doesn’t understand. “Make what up to me?” He’s getting cold again and he wants Bucky to either go back to holding him or let go so Steve can pick up the jacket off the floor.

“This. Everything.” Bucky motions at the room in general, then between the two of them. “Us. When I come back—” But Steve cuts him off.

“You won’t have to wait that long Buck, since I’ll be over there with you soon anyway.” Bucky’s eyes turn fond and sad and Steve resents him a little for that. He sets his jaw. “Besides, there’s nothing that needs fixing.”

“Yeah.” Bucky doesn’t sound convinced but he meets Steve’s mouth when it comes and Steve’s melting like butter in a hot pan and Bucky’s arms are shaking a little so Steve tells himself that he must be melting a little too.

Eventually they break apart for air and decide without so many words to tuck in their shirts and zip up their pants and go home to two mattresses pushed together side by side but not quite touching. So Bucky can get at least a few hours of sleep before he joins the army.


End file.
